From CLI to Full-Stack: Software Development in Hindsight
November 2020 feels like ages ago. I began my journey to becoming a bona fide software developer with many admittedly naïve concepts of what it would be like. Even though you know better, you tend to picture yourself crouching in a dark server room with your laptop hardwired into a supercomputer while you spam binary into a terminal screen pulled straight out of The Matrix.
Of course, in my admittedly limited experience, I’ve never even set foot in a server room. Instead, I have worked harder than I ever did in college, balancing long hours learning how to communicate and implement simple ideas and concepts using multiple, markedly different languages. That being said, all of the headaches, frustrations and endless hard work has been incredibly rewarding every step of the way. From building my first simple if/then logic flow to efficiently managing a global state across a multitude of components, software development has helped me to not only gain confidence in my technical abilities, but my social and cooperative abilities as well.
As someone who prides themselves on the ability to complete tasks with very little outside assistance, I have learned that in order to build the “best” application and solve problems in a timely, efficient manner, you’re going to need to be ok with asking for and accepting help. There were several instances that I touched on in past blogs involving hours of painstaking troubleshooting that were solved in mere minutes with the help of classmates, friends and fellow budding developers. In fact, I can tentatively say that I learned as much about how to work/communicate with others as I did technical coding skills. I’ve now reached the point where I don’t feel ashamed to not be fully knowledgeable about a specific coding topic. We all are striving to learn and accomplish as much as our lives permit. Where I have weaknesses in my knowledge base, someone else has strengths and is willing to help me overcome those gaps. Similarly, I seriously enjoy helping others understand subjects that I happen to be strong in. Its a win-win for both sides. The moment that that idea clicks, the impossibly deep pool of software development knowledge becomes a lot easier to dip into.
As for the technical side of things, I didn’t really grasp just how much I was learning until I looked back at my first month as a student at Flatiron. I knew that I enjoyed computers and definitely knew my way around them. That being said, the extent of my knowledge of coding was 8 years prior when I was messing around with password locking computer application using MS-DOS via .batch files. It is safe to say, I really didn’t know anything. Lo and behold, after the first module I understood basic Command Line Interface and was starting to grasp user interaction and logic flow! As of that first moment when I realized I was making good progress and gaining crucial knowledge, I was hooked. It quickly became apparent that the struggle to understand is a large part of the learning process. I exercised patience with my brain and treated each new piece of knowledge as a stepping stone to the next. Through multiple Zoom calls, hundreds of hours laying awake thinking about my code and hundreds upon hundreds more actually writing, I built a remarkably strong foundation (if I do say so myself) and continue to build upon it everyday*.
So yeah, these months hunched over my keyboard have been some of the most productive and dare I say happiest of my adult life. Software development is the creative outlet I never expected to enjoy so deeply. I find myself often daydreaming about interesting projects to undertake before scrambling to jot the ideas down lest I forget them. I feel confident in my ability to write code but, more importantly, to tackle new concepts and strive to learn and improve for the rest of my life.
*As an aside, an interesting note is that my relentless Google and YouTube searches for various coding topics were enough to almost entirely change my recommended feed/ads to software development topics. I guess that is the true mark of a software dev.
